The Outsiders is a shared-world anthology which takes place in a small gated community in the UK called Priory, home to a cult that worships a colossal squid. Five different authors each contribute stories which fit together nicely. Each of our viewpoint characters are outsiders in some way either for being largely friendless, being black in a largely white neighborhood, being an unbeliever, or being gay in a religious community that frowns upon that. I felt like each story in the collection was better than the one before.

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“There’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is – common decency.”

During the beginning of the Covid pandemic, The Plague by Albert Camus had a spike in popularity. I’m a bit late to jump on the bandwagon, but I’m glad I got around to reading it. Quotes from it, such as the one above, speak directly to our times, in which an act of common decency, such as wearing a mask, is the best way to fight disease.

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As with most anthologies, I liked some stories more than others. Your own personal tastes will likely differ from my own. For example, I’m personally not a fan of gross-out stories. I think stories that trigger disgust rather than fear shouldn’t even be considered horror, but rather be their own genre.

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Most of these stories are narrated by male characters, most involve bickering couples with relationship issues, and many of them involve characters seeing things that disappear.

“Just Another Horror Story” is a bit meta, as you’d expect from the title. It has a nice, unsettling atmosphere and is left unresolved at the end in a good way.

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Harlan Ellison is considered one of science fiction’s grand masters and I’ve heard praise for the title story in this collection, so I decided to give it a try.

“I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream” doesn’t have much of a plot. Basically, four men and one woman are being tortured by an artificial intelligence the whole time. The woman has sex with all the men even though they beat her and ignore her cries.

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When we first meet Cassiopeia, she lives in a small, repressive Catholic town in Mexico in 1927. She’s a Cinderella figure scrubbing floors and doing other household work at her cousin’s command. She also has to put up with an abusive grandfather. Her father has died and her mother is in the same position she’s in.

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The Black Vampyre was written in response to Polidori’s Vampyre. The edition I read contained a fascinating introduction which provided context for the story and numerous footnotes which explain the now-obscure references in the story.

The Black Vampyre was written anonymously, attributed to one Uriah Derick D’Arcy (this is an anagram of Richard Varick Dey, who may have been the actual author). Like Polidori, the author quotes lines about vampires from Byron’s “The Giaour” which compared Greece being subject to the Ottoman Empire to slavery. D’Arcy takes up this theme, applying it to African slaves in America.

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